Is Stitching Permanent? Armor Maintenance

We tend to think of sewing as permanent, when in many cases it can be used as a strong but temporary means to hold armor together, making it easy to repair, but strong in use.
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[@chstoney]

I just want to express my wish for you to continue making videos in your style. KZbin does not need more entertainers, but humanity certainly does not have enough educators.

[@KnyghtErrant]

Thank you very much. That comment means a lot to me.

[@MrMonkeybat]

I always find interesting facts very entertaining. Particularly when they are as well researched and articulated as they are on this channel.

[@historywithhilbert146]

That was very interesting, and a very good point. I guess in our modern age of total distraction with wifi and netflix and historical youtubers we're constantly busy with at least one but often more things at once, but in the past people, when they had a spare moment, would be doing things like this, stitching, cleaning, repairing etc. Thank you for your interesting content, Hilbert

[@KnyghtErrant]

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it. I think it's often difficult to avoid coloring our perception of what was convenient or normal for our historical counterparts based on what we consider convenient today :)

[@historywithhilbert146]

Thanks for getting back in touch :) Absolutely I would agree with you, times were very different and the whole perception of everything was different back then. Thank you for all the hard work you put into your videos!

[@johncarpenter3502]

Well done, Navy Buddy! If you were a professor, I'd have a doctorate times three. I hated school so much I joined the USMC out of high school and thought it was fun. I went to college after the Marines and got a commission in the Navy. Keep up the great work!

[@GabrielThorpshaniqua]

You should make a video about the barbuda helmet, if it is a historical helm. There is also one on Amazon for reference

[@3851035]

Such a cool channel! Ian, would you be willing to do a video on the different types of historically accurate medieval leg armor, both for common soldiers and men-at-arms? From what I can tell, there is some information out there on plate cuisses, but not much else.

[@KnyghtErrant]

Hi Tyler. Full leg armor is one of those things that tends to signify a person of status just by virtue of having it. In artwork, people of low status are not usually shown wearing any. The common soldier or levied infantry probably wouldn't have much in the way of lower limb armor. The examination of the remains at the Battle of Visby showed highly disproportionate amounts of wounds to the lower limbs compared to other locations on the body on what amounts to an army composed of what we believe to be common soldiers. It suggests that they had either very inadequate or no leg armor at all.

[@3851035]

Thanks!

[@viridisxiv766]

i have a question, it may seem foolish to more knowledgeable people but bear with me. why do some helmets have rounded crowns that follow the head, while others are more pointed?

[@KnyghtErrant]

Both really accomplish the same thing, in that either a conical or spherical shape will present a glancing surface to a bladed weapon or projectile. They give weapons a very poor chance to gain purchase. A strongly pointed surface is probably more optimal against certain expected directions of impact.

[@viridisxiv766]

okay thanks.

[@sealaz1]

nice video! just curious, where do you buy your helmets? where can you even find historically accurate reproductions?

[@KnyghtErrant]

My bascinet was made by armorer Piotr Feret (www.platener.eu).

[@sealaz1]

that was quick! thanks i'll check it out!

[@MrVvulf]

You must be one hell of a seamstress. I look at that bodice and know for sure it would take me about a week, plus a half dozen sterile bandages for the holes I'd poke in my fingers.

[@brotherandythesage]

Things D&D never will teach you.

[@algi1]

I had no idea. This is so interesting.

[@ARR0WMANC3R]

I wonder what medieval people would think of zippers.

[@KnyghtErrant]

Heresy!

[@lakewooded4929]

Keeps your squire busy, too!

[@AirWolf2301]

Subed 5 min ago and now a new vid :P

[@KnyghtErrant]

Good timing! :) Welcome to the channel!

[@blakewinter1657]

The explanation makes a lot of sense. I found it surprising because I think of 'quick detach' mechanisms whenever I think of things that need to come apart for regular maintenance.

[@tasatort9778]

Yeah, in the middle ages they didn't have spray on detergents or quick couplers, so they had to come up with a way to clean and repair the various elements of their composite garments; and sewing is a simple and effective solution.

[@rubengalvan1031]

Just to say THANK YOU VERY VERY MUCH

[@BGH1961]

I'm new to your channel, although I did hear of your work a couple of years ago. I'm currently watching your video collection while hand-sanding and polishing my longsword. I'm fairly sure they didn't have sandpaper back then, but I can easily picture someone slathering glue onto fabric and dropping it into finely-ground sand. Two points. First, I wonder if, instead of describing it as 'sewing', which has come to have such sexist connotations in the modern world that is repellent to the popular self-imagery of North American males, the process of attaching the mail to cloth were called 'lacing up' as in 'lacing up shoes' whether modern males might cotton on to it better, in the same way a certain restaurant noticed that men stopped ordering quiche when the book "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche" came out, so they renamed it to Bacon and Egg Pie and sales resumed. Secondly, the whole idea that doing things by hand and repairing or maintenance is very hard and tedious and drudgery and therefore to be avoided is a core story of our society. The idea of taking things apart and maintaining them has also been discouraged for the past century, so that it has become cheaper to throw out the old thing and buy a new one, which is, of course, not built to last because it (whatever 'it' is) as been manufactured en masse by industrial machinery. I routinely see expressed the idea that there must be some power tool or some artificial chemical to use that would save time and labour. No indication of what that extra time is to be used for, mind you, and watching educational videos on youtube while sanding down rough spots on metal equipment is a great way to spend time, as far as I'm concerned.

[@widowpeak6142]

Nowadays, we would use velcro or a zip for that, but I suppose it is the closest equivalent back in the day. And besides, it is not like a knight wouldn't have somebody else to do the stitching for him =P

[@renaissance255]

hi ian, love your videos and the channel in general, i completely gush over 13-16th century european armor i was wondering how reliable the beaks of warhammers/poleaxes/bec de corbins/lucernes were at penetrating plate armor? i've seen some sources say that their use was specifically for that, and i figure there was a reason that the beaks stayed; but my inner biased self wants to believe that plate armor was just too good to be penetrated like that, even if the wound was non-fatal. i believe if something like that were to go through the armor and didn't go deep enough to kill the other man, the attacker would have a problem with getting it out, and merely get their weapon stuck. were these beaked points good at their job, or were they only used as a spike for impaling lesser armored opponents?

[@divanavitch]

I go through this with my helm liner/padding. I dread it every time but I just push through. 😜

[@hedgetwentyfour2708]

I would think that the cloth needs a cleaning more often than the mail, so couldn't you use some kind of dry detergent of cleaning spray on it?

[@Highmedievalhooligan]

Heh heh heh....I knew that answer before I watched the video because of all the times I've had to stitch back together a tube on a gambeson, a leather to a gauntlet, etc.

[@cjf-rw8vl]

hey can you review the WW1 experimental armors on chubachus' channel?

[@Mtonazzi]

Just one critique on the video: i feels awkward that it became a thumbnail within the video as the content was still displayed But that's all about it.

[@jared925]

A three and a half minute video? Must be a new record for your shortest video. Anyway, I've never taken my aventail off of the padding to clean it, I just use a spray oil on it and then some sand paper if there's a little rust. Since sprays weren't around back then, I think I would have rather just dunked it in oil rather than take it apart and sew it, although I guess that's what squires are there for.

[@KnyghtErrant]

You should do whatever works best for you. Historically we know that mail was frequently cleaned by tumbling though, which would destroy any attached fabric. You might be able to get away with dipping a mail sleeve in oil, but I wouldn't recommend it as over-oiling something makes it attract grime and dirt like crazy.When it comes to something like an aventail though, where the liner is padded with raw cotton and doesn't just come away from the mail without removing stitching, if you submerged it in oil it would likely become unwearable as the soaked padding would never dry and would go rancid.

[@edwarddoernberg3428]

When sewing garments I find that removing stitching and resewing leaves marks and if done repeatedly weakens cloth greatly. using my sewing machine and nice tight stitching I can only repair a seam a handful of times before the cloth is damaged enough to fail, also modern garment stitching takes a significant amount of effort to undo, I have found that undoing a misplaced seam involving fine stitching in moderately delicate fabrics takes far longer than it did to sew.. others may have had similar experiences with modern fabrics and sewing methods. One thing you didn't mention in this video you have in the past is that steel to cloth stitching is a whip stitch, this is a very course stitch that does not pass through the fabric as often as the finer stitching usually used on clothes. it is far quicker to sew and removes far more easily and cleanly than the seems we sew on modern clothing. Also the heavier often quilted fabrics sued to line armor are far more durable than the fabrics used in most common clothing and could be sewn and unstitched far more often without causing meaningful damage. This does leave the question of how to deal with the leather that is actually riveted to the steel. over time leather can stretch deform and get quite unpleasant, particularly when allowed to get moist while under load from rain or sweat as might happen to any of the leather used in a suit of armor Some of the helmets you showed used vervails or small holes in the plate to allow the leather to be sewed down to the armor but some rivet leather to the steel and other components are sewn to the leather. are these rivets also removable or is the working life of the armor now limited by the life of the leather?

[@KnyghtErrant]

Rivets are also routinely punched or drilled out and replaced in order and to service and change out failed leather components. Straps and other leather components are prone to breaking in use and need to be replaced. There's nothing permanent about a rivet either, but it's somewhat less user-serviceable depending on tools available. A modern sewing machine creates a lock-stitch that is not really intended for removal unless you make a mistake and need to use a seam-ripper to tear something out. That would be wholly inappropriate for this application. However, whip-stitches were used for more permanent application as well, and are a common stitch seen in historical seam construction on less high-stress areas. A whip-stitch can be as fine or as course as you want to make it. It's also appropriate in many cases to use a saddle-stitch to attach fabric or leather and steel components (like the helmet liner in this example, but also for attaching mail to a leather border etc.)

[@electronkaleidoscope5860]

awesome stuff as always man!

[@johndumbeltion1693]

Another winner ! You are an excellent tailor so maybe you can resew in 15 minutes but not me !

[@Aidames]

I'm pretty sure he didn't start with 15-minute sewing either. I think the keyword here is "practice".

[@tummywubs5071]

How did they clean chain mail? I am pretty sure most want to keep it from rusting because of the time and effort what goes into making one.

[@Ygdrasil18]

Tummywubs oiling, wearing it so the mail rings will rub the rust from their own movement or take a barrel, put some sand in it. Place the mail in it. Close the barrel and roll it up and down your garden. The sand will rub the rust down. And din't forget to oil. To prevent some rust you can blueing it. So you heat it up while bathing in oil.

[@tummywubs5071]

Thanks man :D

[@KnyghtErrant]

Historical sources usually point to tumbling media like 'bran' (the husk of the cereal grain) as the abrasive used in a lot of those barrels.

[@tummywubs5071]

Thank you!

[@uganda8887]

Can I get a link to the video of the mail being tumbled?

[@KnyghtErrant]

facebook.com/pg/historicallypatternedmail/videos/?ref=page_internal

[@uganda8887]

Thanks.

[@KalteGeist]

Thanks so much for showing close ups! I'm really interested in making something like this. Is that linen with thin batting? Or just linen layers?

[@KnyghtErrant]

You're welcome! Are you referring specifically to the bodice on the mail sleeves? If so, it's just two layers of heavy linen. If I had canvas weight linen I would have used that. The stuff I used has a little too much stretch in my opinion, but I used what I had on hand.

[@KalteGeist]

Yes, the bodice :) Do you think canvas drop cloth would work? All my local Jo-annes has is "Duck cloth" and I've heard that's kind of prone to tearing.

[@KnyghtErrant]

I couldn't say, I've never used it. Robert MacPherson, the armorer, did a set of similar sleeves and used a hemp ticking fabric. He had this to say about it "It all hemp, and quite strong. It's difficult to rip across the weft, and very difficult to rip across the warp. I can not rip the warp without first notching it and then wrapping around my hands. That's a very admirable characteristic for fabric to be used in a martial garment." www.wmboothdraper.com/Hemps/indexwithnav.html?hemps_index.htm

[@KnyghtErrant]

I don't know if you follow my facebook page, but I just released a blog post about the construction of the mail sleeve garment if you're interested, it may be of use to you - knyghterrant.com/index.php/2017/02/05/a-fabric-bodice-for-mail-sleeves/

[@KalteGeist]

Awesome Ian! Thank you for the work and time you put in to all of this :)

[@shrekas2966]

you should make a debunk of game theory video

[@KnyghtErrant]

I think that's already be done to death...

[@shrekas2966]

Knyght Errant im not native speaker so i understood that you said that metatron and shad already did this.

[@KnyghtErrant]

Ah, sorry, yes :) Shad, Metatron and Skallagrim have all already done it. My opportunities to record video are usually pretty limited, and since those kind of 'response' videos usually need to be done in a timely fashion in order to be relevant, I'm not the best person to do them.

[@sky4eyes]

so every knights know how to sewing

[@Ygdrasil18]

sky4eyes yeah, probably because every knight cleans his own armour…

[@KnyghtErrant]

His servants sure did. But less wealthy men-at-arms probably did a great deal of their own armor maintenance.

[@KnyghtErrant]

One of the first items I was issued in the military was a basic sewing kit :) Whether anyone actually learned to use it, well that's another matter entirely.

[@shrekas2966]

sky4eyes every sildier knows how to sew now.

[@genericfakename8197]

What soldier doesn't know how to sew? I'd think throughout history it's always been needed to maintain equipment.